Original date of blog: January 22nd, 2015
Having just gotten my second tier IX tank, and now saving both XP and coins for my second tier X tank, I’m starting to get a pretty good handle on my tanking style. And I’ve come to see what I’ve done wrong during my earlier battles, where and how I noobed. When I die in battles, sometimes it’s just plain unlucky, but nowadays I find myself looking back and realising where I went wrong. And that realisation is what’ll make me a better player.
Now, despite driving tank destroyers and supposedly having to hang back a little, I find myself going to the front line quite often. This because of two reasons – the first being that I like getting a piece of the action before the battle is over, and the second being that with all these noobs around, I’ve learned that I can’t always depend on my team. I still try to let at least one other team member go first though, letting them scout out the area I’m driving towards. If they get spotted and turn out to be a noob and get killed, they’ll have given me the positions of my enemies and I know what to do to try and start picking them off. And otherwise I will at least know they’ll have snipers, depending on the map.
I’ve learned to force myself to hang back, to become more patient – something that fits tank destroyers. Taking my time to hide and play peek-a-boom, then hide again, etcetera. It works well, for the most part, if not always. I still die. Just a lot less, and my winrate is still steadily climbing. It shouldn’t be that long until I’ve reached 60.00%. Crossing that line will rank me with the other awesome players, even if only in my own mind.
Since a few weeks, I’ve had the sense of mind to listen to my own music while tanking. I’ve always been better at whatever I’m doing when I have the right music on. And with this, it’s no different. My matches have gone far better, to the sound of the Dark Knight Trilogy soundtracks, or those of the Transformers movies, and Tron: Legacy. With those tunes in my ears, I have more patience when tanking, and I have less effort keeping my cool. I go with the flow, so to speak. It’s been good for my growth spurt as a player. I don’t think I’ll ever go without now.
It’s not all been me though. I’ve been playing with some of the people I’ve newly met through Clan LOCA. One of which is Elephant. Though a youngster, he drives excellently, and drives some of the same tanks I do. We work well, because we both have a sense of what needs to be done and how to best go about it in the tanks we drive, in the map we drive in. He’s also one of my fellow admins in the Clan, and actively thinks along, which makes him a joy to work with in that area too.
Then there’s Moose. He’s possibly the oldest guy on WoTB that I know of (excluding my uncle). He’s a very decent player, and I think I have possibly had my very best games with him. It just all clicked. He was where I needed him, I was where he needed me. It was excellent. I’ve never experienced anything like it. At the risk of sounding too dirty; I hope it was as good for him as it was for me.
Another one I’ve tanked with is a guy I will call Bat. He will know why (I think). He’s one of the few people I know in the game who are actually older than I am (though Moose is older than both of us). His stats are impressive, both on his current account and his old one. Only platooned with him once so far, but it was fun. He has a somewhat aggressive tanking style that matches my own. But he knows how to tank a lot better than I do, so it works out better for him for the most part. He is a no nonsense guy, and though he can kid around plenty in the chat, he seems quite serious in his tanking.
I’ve also been platooning quite regularly with Puffin. He’s a great guy, but the odd thing is that one night we’ll have practically only victories, and the other night we just get slaughtered time and again. I have not yet been able to determine why that happens. It makes no sense to me. I’m beginning to read him better though, and have more of a feeling of which tank to pick that which the tank he’ll drive with. Which is easier now that I have two tier IX’s to choose from. Maybe it’ll help make all our nights awesome.
All in all, we form teams with other members of the Clan that work well – people that feel each other, know what’s expected of them and all that. When you play with someone enough, you get a dynamic with that person and there’s little to no communication needed when you enter a battle together. But every once in a while I platoon with someone new that just throws me. Their tanking style is just so different from what I’m used to with other platoon mates. And honestly? I like that. It keeps me on my toes.
One of those is Wolf. Usually platooning means you team up and drive off into one direction together, covering each other and facing the enemy together. But Wolf does something completely different. I went one way, and he went the other. I wasn’t sure what was going on at first, kind of wondered why he’d bother to platoon at all if we weren’t going to actually tank together. But as the battles progressed, and we won time and again, I started seeing the point.
He covers one part of the map, and I cover another. It’s a huge sign of trust from him to me to trust me to do a good job, regardless of who I face. And more baffling; it works. I face my enemies, and shoot them, but I know that I don’t have to worry about the other half of the enemy forces, because Wolf will be taking care of those. And this doesn’t mean we’re both loners. We’re still a team. If one needs help, the other comes, if able. It’s a whole new strategy that’s both exciting and brilliant in its own way.
The other one that recently impressed me with his different style of tanking is Raccoon. My adopted WOTB-son (which totally surprised my WOTB-husband btw), he sometimes takes the time to tank with his momma (lol). Where I drive slow and powerful tanks, he drives fast and light tanks. It is an excellent combination. He drives off, spots targets, I damage them plenty, he picks them off. Or he damages them before I get there and I get to take them out in one go. Matches with Raccoon often end just in a few minutes. Either way, it works really well, and platooning with him has resulted in a lot of great battles that leave me feeling content and satisfied, with sometimes bits of diabolical laughter from me to boot, when we’ve had an especially epic match and the enemy didn’t know what hit them.
Now, when we get epic results, they’re often shared in the Palringo-chat we have. It reminds me a lot of gorilla’s beating their own chests. But why wouldn’t they? The results -are- epic, and in my opinion they deserve getting complimented on them. Most often they’re results I’ve never managed to get myself, making them that much more impressive to me.
Battles fought:3,743
Winrate: 59.04%
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